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Topic: Flour Water Salt Yeast (Read 12105 times)

Ken Forkish's new book Flour Water Salt Yeast publishes by 10 Speed. It's a good book useful for the experienced baker and especially for the beginner. It takes thru hand mixing incerdible looking breads and pizza dough.

Just thumbed through the book at the store today looks really good. The author posted a series of how to videos, which could be very helpful. Check them out on his youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/KensArtisan

Using Flour Water Salt Yeast, I baked a loaf of bread and three pizzas. Both were great. My bread looked like the picture on the cover. The cookbook itself is a marvelous work: well designed layout, clear directions, excellent illustrations, use of weight, temperature and metric system. It can be used by the beginner as well as the more experienced baker as he begins with simple recipes and moves on to recipes made with levain.

Here is a Double-Fed Sweet Levain Bread from the book. This recipe became interesting to me because the author, Ken Forkish, referred the double feeding technique to Chad Robertson. I figured I'd give this a try and compare with the Country Loaf from Tartine Bread.

90% CM ABC10% CM Whole Wheat82% Water (the recipe called for 78% but I increased the water to come closer to the Tartine country bread I make)30% Leaven 2% Salt0.2% IDY

The workflow required 2 feedings to build the leaven (3 hrs apart each feeding). The leaven was ready to be used 5 hours after the 2nd feeding.

Autolyse without the leaven for 30 mins (unlike Tartine bread). Mix all ingredients after the autolyse period. Stretch and fold 4x during the 1st 2 hrs of bulk fermentation. After 4 hrs, divide, shape and proof in the refrigerator for 12 hrs. The dough felt really aerated at this point (maybe too much due to the addition of IDY). Bake at 475F for 50 mins.

The resulting bread was almost identical to the Tartine Country bread I make. The crust, color, flavor, aroma are very similar. The crumb was not as open as the Tartine bread. I would lose the IDY next time to slow down the activity during bulk and let the leaven do its work during the overnight proof.

I posted comparison pics of this bread and Tartine bread for reference. 1st 3 pics are the Double-Fed Sweet Levain Bread while the last 2 pics are my reliable Tartine county bread.

The book is good reading with inspiring stories during the start-up of his bakery and has some simple and foolproof techniques for the new baker.

Thank you! You should try it when you visit Portland and post some pics of their breads. Also, you might want to try Ken's Artisan Pizza while you are there. I believe it is located beside the bakery. Post some pics!

Well I finally made it down to KAB last Sunday. I was starving for some great food and after a quick peek at the menu I decided to order a croque monsieur but was promptly informed that they stopped serving sandwiches at 1500. I looked at my phone and it read 1545, which meant one thing to me: How fast could I make it across town to Apizza Scholls before their opening rush at 4pm? I took a cursory scan of the bread offerings, but didn't see much. $3 baguettes, some torpedo loaves and a couple of eye-catching giant miche loaves were it.

Like most Americans my only exposure to decent bread has been limited to area farmer's markets or my own homemade experiments, so I was genuinely stoked to try some real bread. When I asked the person at the counter about the 1.5kilo miche up above her head I was told that it was naturally leavened and offered in two versions; 40% whole wheat or a Country Blonde. I opted for the blonde since I figured that was closest thing to the Tartine loaf I had been desperately trying to make since late 2010.

Being very hungry at this point in the afternoon and not knowing if or when we would get a table at Apizza Scholls, my wife and I tore into that Country Blonde loaf like you don't even know. My first impression was mixed. I tasted very similar to the Tartine loaf that I make at home. I'm guessing the Country Blonde was either cut with 10% whole-wheat à la Chad Robertson's loaf or augmented with raw wheat germ in the vein of Nancy Silverton's sourdough loaf. The second thing I noticed was the mild taste and sour undertones. From what I've read online the Tartine loaf they serve at the restaurant is much more sour than the book version. The Ken's loaf tasted very similar to my Tartine results. The crust was crisp, but softened a bit after the 3.5 hour drive back up to Seattle.

All in all I was pleased, but not blown away by KAB. That being said I will definitely purchase a copy of Flour Water Salt Yeast because living just a few hours away from the bakery affords me the opportunity taste the authentic versions of the book's recipes and contrast them with my results at home. Having never attempted to make a 1.5 kilo loaf before and having no idea what to expect (or how to judge) taste or crumb wise from a loaf that huge, I don't feel I can pass honest critique about the bread, so I'll let my photos do the talking. Next time I'll arrive at KAB earlier in the day when the bread is fresher and more plentiful. Also, I'm still hungry for that tasty croque monsieur on their menu.

I've recently purchased the book and have made some bread and pizza using Ken's recipes. I'm really impressed with how my pizza turned out, as well as, the bread. You bread looks amazing! It looks just like the country loaf from Tartine, congrats!! Are you proofing in a basket for that loaf?

I have made bread using the Tartine recipe as well as the recipe in Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast. Ken's recipe was almost as good as Tartine but Ken's recipe was much easier to use, and the directions were much clearer. For the slight difference that Tartine provides, I am going with Ken's version.

I recently purchased "Flour Water Salt Yeast" which focuses on the home baker using a Dutch oven with lid. Looking forward to trying the recipes. Currently have the Overnight Pizza dough with levain in the fridge...

Just got a wood fire oven...in regards to the bread recipes...can anyone tell me if I need to make any changes to temperature or oven time? add steam?

I'm a beginner in both breads and pizza...as well as learning WFO - reason for such basic questions!

Just got a wood fire oven...in regards to the bread recipes...can anyone tell me if I need to make any changes to temperature or oven time? add steam?

With the size of your oven, unless you do upwards of 10 loaves at a time, which would generate it's own steam, you will need to compensate greatly by adding steam the first 20 minutes of baking. You can do this by putting a cast iron pan in the WFO to the side for a half hour (after you remove the coals), and when your loaf hits the deck, you add ice to the pan.

I like temperature around 475-500 on the floor. I have found that top browning will occur a bit faster in a WFO since the heat will be radiating from all sides, unlike a home oven.

Thanks for the WFO advice, John. Will be baking Ken's walnut levain bread recipe as well as the overnight pizza dough with levain - tomorrow. I also have your dough recipe (Keste clone) in the fridge....looking forward to a baking day with a friend who's bringing along her own free range chicken and duck. Never too old for a play date.

Plan on posting pictures as soon as I figure out how to do it. Will use the camera on iPad.

So far, the book has been an easy read. Good explanation, format, pictures. I especially like the sample schedule in each recipe -lots of great tips for the beginner baker. Along with Jeffrey Hammelman's Bread book, this is a must.

Loving the book. I've had it about a month and have basically started from the front and working my way backward. I've baked the breads in a dutch oven and the pizzas have been made in a wood fired oven. The instructions and pictures are very representative of each other. As much as I like the Tartine book, the artsy pictures don't really tell the full story. I'll continue to send pictures as I make my way through this thing. Here's one of five pizzas I made on Christmas Night. [Benton's Bacon, Onion, Mozz, Thyme, and Red Sauce]

Here's a link to a blog post I did on it. (Also a small discussion on the necessity for dry wood.)

I just received this book for Christmas and Im looking forward to experimenting. I started reading through it and did notice that I will have to scale some of the recipes down a bit. The breads from this book and on here look great! Do you guys have a favorite bread from the book yet?

I've been baking breads from recipes in Flour Water Salt Yeast for the past few weeks. It is a really well-written book, and for the first time I am really getting comfortable making levain breads. One of the things I finally figured out is that you really have to work at keeping your levain fed, and you have to give it a pretty decent amount of flour on a regular basis as food. In my case, I would often miss a feeding, and i tended to feed in such small quantities that I was almost "starving" the levain. Forkish probably goes overboard with his feeding schedule, which is 500 grams of flour a day! That seems a bit wasteful to me, and I don't need as much levain as he keeps on hand. But I have gone down to retaining 50 grams of levain and feeding it with 250 grams of flour (200 grams white flour and 50 grams whole wheat) and 200 grams of water. I found that when I feed on a very regular basis in sufficient quantities, the character of the levain is quite a bit different. First of all, it leavens a lot better than my old levain did. Second, the flavor is much less sour (duh). The breads I have been making lately are just slightly sour, but they have that wonderful naturally leavened texture.

I've also used some of the recipes for pizza (he uses bread dough recipes for pizza as well) and have really liked them a lot. I should have taken some photos of my recent efforts at pizza with the Forkish pizza recipes. I'll try to post something here next time I make pizza with his recipe. For now, here is a photo of a loaf I made this morning. I used his recipe for "Pain de Campagne" (p141) but cut down on the water a bit. His recipe is for 78% hydration, and I went down to about 75%. I was finding that with the prescribed hydration the dough was just too slack to form a really good loaf, so I cut it back a bit. The flours are Conagra King Midas for the white and Bob's Red Mill whole wheat.